Monday, May 23, 2016

Henry Doorly Zoo

Equipment Used: Nikon D750 and Nikon 70-300mm lense.

My latest photo shoot found me targeting animals that are bigger and a lot more dangerous than the waterfowl I’m used to photographing.  Luckily for me, they were behind glass as the family and I visited the Henry Dory Omaha Zoo a few weeks ago. I was there to get images of zoo animals for a nursery.

I didn’t really know what to expect as far as what lenses to bring so I carried in my 24-120mm f4 but very quickly replaced it with the other lense in my bag, the 70-300mm because I needed the reach. Having done some tests on the lense a week ago, I set it to f6.3 and had the D750 in aperture priority mode. The lighting was much darker than I expected so cranked the ISO to 3200-12800 with the majority of the time having it at 6400. I changed the metering mode to center weighted along with an exposure compensation of 0.7. I also changed the pv button to be able to switch the camera into DX crop mode.

Once in Capture NX-D, I adjusted the RAW files by changing the picture control to nature-landscape and tweaked the exposure compensation if needed. Adjustments to the contrast/saturation and shadow/highlight sliders were made as well.  

In PSE 11, final adjustments were made after cloning out unwanted objects in the image. Levels and layer masks were used to finalize the look of the color of the image. Cropping the image was done if needed as well.  The last was to use the unsharp mask to sharpen the image.

I also added two new backgrounds on the first two images because both animals were inside rooms with cables and cement walls that didn’t look very good. I used layer masks for this work.


With high ISO settings on the D750 and shooting through a plane of glass almost all the time during the walk through the whole zoo, I’m very happy with the results. The selected images should look great in the nursery. 

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